The private prison system is, in John Kiriakou’s account, an industry whose largest operator, GEO Group, is paid to keep every bed occupied and maximizes profit by cutting medication and food.[1][2] For-profit prisons are worse than government-run ones, he argues, because the only way to cut costs is to feed prisoners “animal grade” rather than human-grade food and withhold medication.[3] He describes the fish inmates called “sewer trout,” served from boxes marked “Alaskan cod, product of China” and “feed use only, not for human consumption”; a dead rat found in the communal Kool-Aid; and an all-inmate email in which the warden apologized for accidentally serving dog food on taco night — the shame being, Kiriakou wrote, that no one noticed, because it tasted exactly like the daily ground beef.[4][5][6]
The commissary and staff-theft rackets
Kiriakou describes a parallel racket run by cooks and butchers at FCI Loretto, who stole chicken, beef, or pork for favored inmate customers; each month, the customer’s family would transfer $100 to $150 into the cook’s or butcher’s commissary account in payment. The arrangement left the remaining inmates — those not paying into it — with lower-grade substitutes: chickenless chicken pot pie instead of chicken, hot dogs instead of roast beef, and sloppy joes instead of pork loin, almost all of it, per Kiriakou, animal-grade rather than human-grade food.[7] Guards ran a racket of their own even at his government-run prison, backing pickup trucks up to the commissary to steal pallets of goods like Pop-Tarts and batteries for resale, and diverting commissary profits meant for inmate recreation equipment into a guards-only gym stocked with elliptical machines and treadmills.[8]
Kiriakou hosted a weekly segment on Sputnik called “Criminal Injustice,” on which he once covered a Pennsylvania judge who took bribes from a private prison company to hand down long juvenile sentences.[9]
Denied medical care
Kiriakou describes an elderly Italian inmate he was close to at Loretto who complained of worsening back pain and was repeatedly given nothing but Tylenol at the medical unit; within weeks he was walking with a cane, then in a wheelchair. Only after the chaplain intervened did an exam reveal stage-four spinal cancer, by which point it had spread throughout his body. The warden visited his cell and offered him compassionate release — to die at home — if he signed a release promising not to sue the Bureau of Prisons; he refused, and died in his bunk alone a week or two later.[10]
No rehabilitation, no reform
John Kiriakou cites former Baltimore detective Peter Moskos, author of In Defense of Flogging, who argues that American prisons are “nothing more than employment agencies for otherwise unemployable rural white men” — sited in farmland where the prison is the only industry.[11][12] Kiriakou makes the same point in his own words elsewhere, calling the Bureau of Prisons “nothing more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable” people in rural areas.[13] The only qualification to be a guard, he notes, is a GED and no felony convictions, and prisoners often ran mail call “because the guard who was supposed to do mail call can’t read.”[14][15][13] He adds that educational and job-training programs were phased out in the late 1970s, leaving only a GED class taught by other prisoners, even though the Bureau of Prisons commands roughly a quarter of the Justice Department’s entire budget.[16][17][18] With no real education on offer, Kiriakou says the only things he actually learned in prison were from fellow inmates — how to manufacture methamphetamine, run a Ponzi scheme, and commit mortgage fraud.[19]
As an example of the system’s excess, Kiriakou points to a fellow inmate he met at Loretto — a heating and air-conditioning business owner, tattooed neck to toe but by his account a devoted father of four — who received 20 years for driving a carload of marijuana from Pennsylvania to Ohio, a sentence that also put the dozen employees of his business out of work.[20] He notes the United States holds 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prison population, and that with no rehabilitation on offer, recidivism runs high — Bureau of Prisons’s own figures show 45% of prisoners re-incarcerated within three years, though Kiriakou elsewhere puts the figure above 50%.[17][21][22] He describes the system overall as racist, xenophobic and anti-poor, arguing it compounds the problem by treating mental illness as a disciplinary matter rather than a medical one, filling solitary confinement with the mentally ill.[23] He cites psychological studies finding that roughly 85% of incarcerated Americans suffer from some form of mental illness, most commonly antisocial personality disorder — a statistic he says taught him, above all else, to trust no one.[24][25] Because private prison companies can only turn a profit by cutting spending on food and medical services, he predicts conditions will keep worsening and deaths in custody will keep rising as privatization spreads.[26]